


Dark Before Dawn

by hellkitty



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Comfort/Angst, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-06-10
Packaged: 2018-04-03 17:33:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4109230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kinda sorta a kink meme fill?  This is just a slightly cleaned up version, you know, actually proofread and shit. Oh, and unanoned. </p><p>The Ace survives, and things are, well...a little broken between him and Furiosa.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Before Dawn

**Author's Note:**

> I'm still using my shiny headcanon that since he's credited as 'the Ace' in IMDB, that that's a rank, like a second in command.

Feeling the familiar lurching rise of the platform unsettled Furiosa. This didn’t feel like victory, really--too much had been lost, spent, wasted. She’d left...only to return again, a kind of full circle that changed nothing and everything. 

And all for a man’s pride. 

And her pride, too, she realized, as the darkness of  the Citadel’s landing platform covered them.  Her pride, her sacrifice of her crew. Her War Boys. Her men, and she’d just thrown them away, thrown them aside. 

No, worse than that: she’d used them, used their abilities and their loyalty, and she’d intended, fully intended, to leave them behind, having paid the price for her freedom with their bodies and pain and lives. 

If there’d been any surge of victory in her, it faded, fast, at the thought, and it seemed only right and just that she confront it, that she look her men--if any had survived, in the eye, if only to witness what her ambition had done to them. So she’d remember. So she’d never forget. 

If any of them had made it back.  Morsov...she knew they’d lost him. And how many others in the storm? 

“Furiosa?” A voice behind her--Toast’s, she placed--and a hand on her arm. “You all right?”

“Something,” she murmured, shaking her head.  “I have to do.” And her feet led her, heel-heavy on the still-familiar stone corridors, to the infirmary.  Furiosa sucked in a breath, smelling the antiseptic and rank sweat of the place, before she could bring herself to scan the flat stone ledges for her Boys.  

And it was like fate, or fate’s older sister, retribution, that dropped her eyes on the Ace, as though drawn there, iron to magnet. She’d know the uneven line of his shoulders, the jut of his jaw, anywhere. 

She felt her heart plummet into her icewater cold belly, even as her mind said ‘he’s not dead, at least.’  It was a consolation like a knife blade--thin and cutting, and she forced herself to move, on heavy legs, beside him.  

His body was stippled with abrasions, scoured by the sandstorm’s fury, a bandage across his shoulders covering gasoline burns, and one wrist was braced straight, strapped to a metal bar to hold it straight, and as she watched, he gave the tell-tale restless shift of someone in the grips of bone fever.  

“Ace,” she said, dropping to one knee, just to say his name, to make it real. He was here, he was alive.  

He mumbled something, eyes rolling wildly, unfocused. 

“It’s me.”  

A fumbling expression on his face, tipping toward her, and she felt them flare in recognition, then grow cold. “Bos--Imperator.” The shift to the title was a push away, a crouch into hostility. 

What now, she thought. What could she possibly say to explain, to make things right between them. Because she desperately wanted to, suddenly, looking at the wary hurt in his scarred face.  He’d been the closest she’d had to a friend here, loyal and trusting. And she’d betrayed that, used that.  “I’m sorry.” 

Weak. Such weak words; there was no way they could carry all she felt. Just shapes of air that could be meaningless, if she didn’t feel the sinewy tug at her chest.  

He grunted, pushing away the hand she reached toward him, rolling onto his side to turn his back to her. 

“Ace…”

“Not talking.” In any other moment it would have, might have, been funny, how almost childish it was, his sulking silence.  But not right now.  It was a rejection and one she couldn’t deny she deserved.  

But if he could be stubborn, so could she, so she dropped down onto the ground, leaning her shoulders against the rough stone. He’d have to talk to her eventually.  She could wait. It was the least she could do. 

It was a long night, the stone leaching heat from her body, kept awake by the restless moans of the sick War Boys, the restless shifting of night fevers and the smell of disease and the herbal tang of the ointment spread over gasoline burns.  But Ace remained flint-stony still above her, and she suspected he was as awake as she was, aware of the other nearby, feeling the raw distance between them so physically small and yet in every other way, it had never been bigger.  

***

The hour of feverbreak stretched toward them, the sky fading from indigo to grey through the high slit windows. And despite how hard Ace tried not to move, tried to deny the damage to his body--bones broken following her orders, fighting off the Buzzards chasing her, there was only so much he could push, until his body fought back, shivering with fever, sweat beading on his skin as it tried to cool him down.  

Furiosa had been through this enough, sometimes on hot, delirious side of it.  She left his side just long enough to find a small bottle of water and a clean rag, perching on the edge of the stone to swab the clean, cool water over his lumpy throat, down his scorched and scabbed arms. This she could do for him, and this required no words between them. And it didn’t make up for anything, of course, didn’t make it right.  But it could make him suffer less, at least a little, and whether or not he’d speak to her again, he deserved that much. 

She’d never touched him before, not like this.  They’d sparred, of course, keeping each other sharp, keeping each other ready, wary.  But never like this, where he was prostrate and limp, mouth flattening and pinched in heat and pain. 

The fever broke in silence--in all this, he made no sound, nothing more than the scrape of his foot on the stone--his body wracking in a shudder before subsiding against the sweat-damp stone, his breathing easing. Furiosa gave one last swipe with the rag over his chest, down his unbraced arm, taking his hand in hers.  Just holding it, to feel the contact, warm and alive, if clammy damp and weak.  

She let herself study his knuckles for a long time, as if memorizing the sandblasted lines and crisscrossing of old scars, and she felt his own gaze on her, studying her, as though trying to read--who knew--in her face.  

He pushed back, not quite away from her, curling up to sit, bandages wrinkling, his wrist brace scraping the stone. “Water,” he croaked, and his voice sounded as dry as the desert, raspy and hard.  She lifted the bottle, and he took it awkwardly in his braced hand, leaving his other in hers.  He still had the habit of taking small sips from long training of work in the heat, pausing after each swallow, like letting the water settle in. Disciplined, as always. And it was so familiar, the way he drank, the way he tilted his head to cover the scar on his mouth, that she could almost pretend it was like before. 

Almost, but not quite, and it was the gap that seemed unbridgeable. 

“You left us,” he said, finally, cradling the bottle against his chest.  “Th’Immortan himself coming down on us like a thunderhead. And you left us.”  

“I know,” she said, bowing her head, resting her forehead on his knuckles. He hadn’t pulled away--that was a good sign, right?  “I had--I thought I had--something more important.”  She’d thought to sew her future to her past, grafting a withered, warped limb onto a tree that...had died.  

“More important than your crew?” Incredulity, mixed with the hurt in his voice.  They gave her everything--their blood, their loyalty. What could be more important than that: bodies and hearts granted without quarter? 

Of course it seemed unfair. It was unfair. What could she say? She had no defense. Especially not since they’d ended up...right here.  With half her crew gone, and her Ace...like this.  “You could have told us,” he said, finally, voice hard as concrete. “About the Wives.  About what you were doing.” 

She looked up, meeting his storm-cloud eyes. She could do that much, she could face his hurt, take his blows.  

“Damn fever got me here,” he snapped. “Wasn’t deaf. Everyone talking about it, you know.”  

She didn’t know if she felt relief that she didn’t have to explain, or anxiety that she had to explain it better--if she even could. “You wouldn’t have agreed to it,” she said. It had been a stupid enough idea when only she was the one at risk, “And I was going to tell you.  Eventually.”  When they got to the Green Place, she’d thought. Her men, her War Boys, and the paradise of the Vuvalini. A reward, the best she could offer. That had been...more of a pipe dream than a plan, she realized now, something to tell herself to cover over the fact she had fully expected--counted on--the fact that they’d all die.  

“You don’t know that,” he said, hotly. But he didn’t deny it outright. He’d had a tendency to critique and question her decisions: it was why she valued him so much. And there had been so many holes, so many flaws in her scheme that even if he’d agreed to the idea, he’d have shot the tactics full of holes.  Rightly so.  

She’d needed the hope intact to do it at all. 

“Point is...we trusted you. We trusted you with our lives. Every day. Every raid. And when it came to it--” he gave a frustrated flap of his injured hand. “You didn’t trust me with yours.” 

She heard the shift in pronouns--’me’, he’d said. This was personal, beyond their rank of Imperator and Ace.  This was her and him.  That was what she had broken.

“Always followed orders,” he said, looking away. “Always been a good Ace for you. ...just think I deserve better’n that. That’s all.”  

He did, and it broke her heart open, like glass dropping on the stone floor. And it wasn’t a grief like out in the desert beyond the grey wastes, before the salt plains. That had been uprooting her past; this was tearing her present; and this was a real person--not a years-dead ghost--looking at her with living, wounded eyes; not a victim of fate and cruelty, but of her choices, her selfishness.  “You did. You do,” she said, and tears as hot as a simoom spilled from her eyes, all the grief and weakness she’d been hiding for so long, shaking its way out of her, in a gross, hiccuping sob. 

And she felt him pull his hand out of hers, and then the two of them were leaning against each other, clinging blindly with their arms and hands, more desperate than children because more tragic and more aware and more...broken.

Her cheek was pressed against the knotty mass of scars and tumors on his throat, swollen and diseased,  but she didn’t care, because it was his shoulder, his throat, and his heartbeat she could feel against her, his hand squeezing at her, his scalp smooth against her mouth, and he was holding her while she cried and she thought that maybe, just maybe, he might forgive her.

And then, in time, she might be able to forgive herself. 


End file.
